DONETSK, June 3. /TASS/. Vasily Prozorov, a former agent of the Ukrainian Security Service, on Friday said the US Central Intelligence Agency started to set up its secret prisons in Ukraine during the administration of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko.

"Secret prisons in Ukraine are not a novelty. Under Ukrainian President Yushchenko, when Ukraine openly succumbed to the Western world for the first time, the CIA set up these secret prisons in Ukraine," Prozorov, now head of the investigations center Ukr Leaks, said at a news conference in Donetsk. "It was for people suspected of international terrorism that are not citizens of Ukraine," he said.

After the 2014 coup in Kiev and the outbreak of hostilities in Donbass, the security forces of Ukraine set up a network of prisons in the east of Ukraine. According to Prozorov, they operated and continue to operate "practically in every department of the SBU," as the Ukrainian security service is known.

The former agent said after 2014, the SBU stopped operating under national legislation.

"After the 2014 coup, the SBU’s disregard for law, the use of extrajudicial reprisals, illegal methods of interrogation, imprisonment became the norm for the SBU," he said. "In many ways, that came from Western handlers. It was their methodology that was adopted by the SBU and other law enforcement agencies [of Ukraine]".